#I was a die hard fan since early 2006 and those claims always made me roll my eyes

[eucatastrophicblues]

@brilliancetheory you see my vision and have the same war flashbacks…

[iambenjiijackson]

Reviews - The Groove Guide - 2007

Nas: Hip Hop Is Dead.

Nas is no stranger to controversy - he included a clip of P. Diddy being crucified in his 1999 "Hate Me Now" much to his chagrin, and now many rap artists around in the south of North America believe the name of his album, Hip Hop Is Dead, is an allegation that 'Snap' style is killing the rap scene.

If that is the case, then they are in a great deal of trouble; this is easily the best work Nas has done since Illmatic and I Am..., both seminal albums of their time; from the eponymous track on the album through the incredible flow of Nas' raps during Black Congressman and Money over Bullshit, something that lacked flair over the course of his last two albums.

Definitely one of the standout albums of his career, Nas' finds himself treading that line between conscious hip hop and the  “Mafioso” rap styles. Static X – Cannibal. 

At the beginning of the 2000's, Static-X were considered to be the next big metal act. They seemed to have everything going for them; their 1998 debut release Wisconsin Death Trip was a success and their second album was touted as their catapulting them - however, something went wrong; the album floundered and since then they never recaptured their early success.

Cannibal seems to show Static-X mature, however, and it's the usual down-tuned guitars and nu-industrial sound become more refined previous releases. Unlike previous efforts, the album has finally veered away from the typical nu-metal blueprint, incorporating guitar solo's and licks into their music, while the industrial element is more 'dirtier' - almost as if the group has been listening to Ministry. 

Cannibal is a pleasant surprise for the metal community and provides good progression for the group. 

Puddle Of Mudd - Famous.

Maybe it's the angsty kid in me that warms to Puddle Of Mudd, or maybe sometimes guilty pleasures take over, but when presenter with formerly post-grunge band's latest efforts, part of me was hesitant to take a listen to it - after all, their line up changes rival that of soccer clubs and their second album whimpered in comparison to their highly successful debut, Come Clean. 

But I was actually pleasantly surprised; sure, they're not a cutting edge electro outfit, but they serve their purpose and provide hard rocking tracks such as "Famous" and power-poppy elements with "Merry-Go-Round". 

It's the Nickelback it's ok to like.... again.

Red Riders – Replica Replica.

Where Evermore are taking their Adult Orientated, Middle of the Road act to Australia and making it successful, it would seem that bands out there are eager to show that's not all they listen to. Red Riders first full-length release, Replica Replica, indicated that such influences as My Bloody Valentine and Gang of Four are represented; this becomes more apparent throughout the album. Although this is a well-trodden musical path, that they are good at what they do; “Slide Next To Me” being one of the standout tracks as well as album opener “C'Mon”.

However, as previously implied, it's more of the same from an already cluttered music genre. Bands like this are seemingly flooding the Australasian scene, and it takes something really accomplished and significant to make a dent in this scene. Red Riders, sadly, look to be one of the bands lost in the crowd. Pity...

Foo Fighters - Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace. Perhaps the most anticipated album heading in the summer, with production handled by Gil Norton who worked on the incredible sophomore effort 'The Color And The Shape' and a solid leadoff single, 'The Pretender', the latest album by the Foo Fighters had a great deal to live up to. 

'Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace' contains some good tracks, such as the single, the Courtney Love venting 'Let It Die' and even 'Cheer Up Boys (Your Makeup Is Running)', but doesn't seem to push the band forward. With a strong acoustic presence on the album, including the bluegrass style 'The Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners', 

Dave Grohl sadly seems indecisive where to take the group next - if anywhere. By all means, this isn't a bad album, and it does have flourishes of excellence here and there but ultimately it falls into the 'average' category, as if Mr Grohl and cohorts have decided for the most part to stick to the middle of the road, with the album already being compared to another weaker effort from the group, 'There Is Nothing Left To Lose.'

Blackmail – Aerial View.

In a world where variety equates to being the spice of life, it's always nice on paper to see a band attempt to traverse the musical landscapes and attempt to appeal to a broad spectrum of music fans. Unfortunately, for Blackmail, their attempt is a little less than desirable; it would seem that the band's attempt to do this equates to an album with different styles juxtaposed on this release – ranging from post-punk and the inclusion of a trumpet. Yet partway through they sound like they're tired of trying that post-punk sound and end up going down the “alternative rock” road, which although plays to their strength, also sounds like many other groups out there all battling to squeeze into one square that's already quite full.

Should Blackmail find their niche they could be a very good band. Sadly, this effort isn't the case.

P.O.D – Greatest Hits (The Atlantic Years)

After spending seven years with Atlantic Records before moving in 2006, Christian Rapcore group P.O.D release a retrospective of their work on the label since the 1999 release of The Fundamental Elements of Southtown. Their popularity stems not just with the religious community, but fans of, dare I say it, Nu-Metal. If you're not familiar with P.O.D, their messages within the music aren't gospel, more life-affirming with “Alive” and “Boom” both proving that.

The only problem is that they've neglected some tracks popular with their fans; “Hollywood” and “School Of Hard Knocks” have been omitted, the latter being a big commercial hit. Instead, we're subjected to two 'new' studio tracks (”Here We Go” was and “Going In Blind”) as well as an almost humiliating reggae track “Set Your Eyes To Zion” showing that we can expect from the “Southtown Generals”.

Sadly, it's a guilty pleasure to listen to.

Various - Computer Incarnations For World Peace. Now I am all for electronica music. Hell, I'm even down with Nintendocore. But this thirteen-track selection of, what is touted as 'soulful new wave and dubby rock', in all honesty, plays out more like a poor mans euro-dance. 

If we were all back in the early nineties, possibly in Denmark, then maybe there would be a market for this. However, in this day and age, maybe in part due to glitch and electro-sleaze artists pushing the envelope out, this release is offensive due to its inoffensiveness. 

Maybe that's what they were going for - but I direct your attention to the track 'Garden Of Life', which is a throwback to before Hi-NRG was established; and you know that was a bad era in music. Utterly disappointing, and will make you think Whigfield was Aphex Twin.

The Cooper Temple Clause – Make This Your Own.

Gone are the aggressive songs such as “Promises, Promises” and “Who Needs Enemies” and instead we get something at times sounds progressive, and at others like the group have listened to a lot of recordings around the time of the British Invasion of music to America, None the less, Make This Your Own is a step forward for a band who could have continued their cocky swagger down their progressive rock route; instead, they charm the listener with indie-jangle melodies as well as that trademark dirty bass in such songs as “Homo Sapiens” and  “Isn't It Strange”.

For those of you wanting to make comparisons to the baggy sound, the band and Kasabian were bringing back, expect nods in that direction; but where Kasabian deviated prominently from the sound that made them popular, The Cooper Temple Clause have honed after three albums a new direction that intermittently works.

Art Brut -  It's A Bit Complicated. For Art Brut, deconstructing the subjectivity of the music scene has become a forte for the British alternative indie group. Their first album attacked the past love life of vocalist Eddie Argos, and with their new album, the deprecating humour now encompasses an almost conceptual story about University life. 

It's A Bit Complicated still contains the same wry vocals, but instead of self-apperception it touches upon the life and times of University students, discussing lack of money, the novelty of learning another language and the romanticizes the idea of young love. 

However, this is Art Brut, and as such the topics are brushed with an acerbic sentiment in which many are in the line of fire, most notably the 'hipster' indie scene, including one of the album's finest moments, “Nag Nag Nag Nag” with an immortal commentary; "Wet trousers in the washing machine/But I'd rather be damp than seen in jeans."

Bad Religion - New Maps of Hell. The punk scene is home to many legendary acts; it's just difficult to pinpoint one or two, because of different variants of punk. Of recent years, the scene has paid homage to NoFX, Pennywise and Bad Religion. 

Having established themselves back in 1985, the group really came into their own after a reformation with the release of their seminal album, Suffer. Many lay claims that their latest album, New Maps of Hell is a replication of the grandiosity that particular album; it isn't. 

Though it is a good album, it further exemplifies Bad Religion's influence on a greater number of bands, and unfortunately that their sound, while at one point may have been groundbreaking, is now a staple of any new punk band. Dues towards the band have been paid, and it's great to see them pro-active. It's just sad the once important SoCal punk group are now a nostalgia item. 

Recommended for punks, but not a casual listen.

Turbonegro - Retox. Listening to Turbonegro's previous albums, especially around their Scandinavian Leather, are a pastiche to the sleazy glam rock era of the early to mid-eighties. Their popularity as the fun, crude punk act saw them once as the pinnacles of the 'deathpunk' scene they were affiliated with. 

In part, a joke and then again very serious with their approach, listening to Retox, the Norwegian band's eighth album, is not for the ardent 'muso'. What it is, however, is a fine nihilistic punk album with derision of how serious the music scene really is. 

One could call it post-modern, however much like The Ramones, it's simply dumb rock 'n' roll done with bravado - Do You Dig Big Destruction and Hot and Filthy both quintessential party anthems that make it hard not to have a soft spot for the 'homo punk metal' outfit.

Jamie T - Panic Prevention.

With songs like the radio staple Sheila and Pacemaker, allusions to the often touted "Arctic Monkeys meet The Streets" moniker seem evident. Therein lies the problem with the newest member of a crop of British solo artists, Jamie T. With his English "chav" dialect and an almost faux-pas urban vocal selection, it sometimes seems hard for those outside the United Kingdom to 'get' what he is talking about.

Cast that aside, however, and the album does contain some diamonds in the rough, with Salvador proving the mock-cockney ambiguity isn't concurrent throughout the album, while Dry Off Your Cheeks further showcases what he is capable of. At times, you're half expecting Billy Bragg to confess that the album is actually written by him, sans the mock-ney accent.

However, you can't help but squirm with lyrics such as "Smack Jack The Cracker Man". Approach with caution; cans of Red Stripe are advised.

Dub Pistols - Speakers and Tweeters. Mixing tracks with some sublime hip-hop tenacity with their intended dubwise sound, this third offering from London dub act Dub Pistols is easily one of their most accessible albums to date. Having such a knack for remixing other artists music (they remixed, of all songs, Limp Bizkit's 'My Way'), the album contains their spin of Blondie's electro-fused classic 'Rapture' along with a grime-like ballad of The Stranglers anthem 'Peaches'. However, it does beg to question if this album, perhaps even the group as a whole, has an appeal to a niche market out there - those who still listen fondly to the days The Slits and The Clash started playing dub. However, given the modern-day spin to the songs this album finds itself retreading, there's the problem it could alienate its original audience. It is a good release, it's just confused what it wants to really be.

Tokyo Police Club - A Lesson In Crime. Fifteen minutes. That's how long the "mini-album" of Canadian indie rock group Tokyo Police Club's release, "A Lesson In Crime" lasts. Yet it is an important fifteen minutes for the listener; the group have made a declaration towards other group emanating from this genre that a future full-length release is not only impending and ominous but is going to be big. The sprint of opening track "Cheer It On" opens the gateway to a fifteen-minute tease of what the group are capable of - at times verging on post-punk and at other times steadfastly rooted in the indie genre. 

The EP plays out like one long single, but many a time where they are a hindrance, in this case, it is a blessing; Tokyo Police Club are unquestionably a band that have set their goals and sights high and look to achieve that goal. A quintessential purchase.

Ruptus Jack - Ruptus Jack. It's a dirty world, the rock and roll scene. Dirty is a good word in this case however when you listen to what many thought Jet would have brought with their latest album. Alas, it's up to Ruptus Jack to provide us with that sort of nostalgic rock that The Datsuns gave to us - and it's plentiful on their eponymous debut. 

With a raucous Reverend Hutch's Sermon leading into “Ulterior Motives” as pivotal to the track as the opening proclamation of Mudhoney's “In 'n' Out of Grace.” It's nothing intricate musically, but then those complexities one would associate with post-punk and the scene we're in at the moment can become somewhat tiresome, and it's always refreshing to hear something with a little more bite in the New Zealand music scene. Perfectly acceptable balls-out rock!

Tim Armstrong - A Poet's Life. If you've followed the prevailing career of punk act Rancid, and in particular lead singer Tim Armstrong, and wondered when the band would go down the dub/reggae route much like many of the British punk bands walked towards the end of their careers, then Armstrong's solo effort, A Poet's Life would be that point. 

A jack of many trades, with not only old school punk but also a mesh of rap-punk with his 1999 project The Transplants, some of the tracks from the album are reminiscent to those on the self-titled Transplants album - only replace the crashing guitars with upstroke semi-acoustics, and the rapping of Rob Aston with ragga vocals - and it's actually pleasantly surprising! It's very evocative of when The Clash's experimentation with a similar style and quells these cold Auckland nights with the thought of this playing while in the sun, with Into Action and Take This City prime candidates of this epithet. Tim Armstrong - too many - can do no wrong. 

The Klaxons - Myths Of The Near Future.

Dancepunk is the new Nu-Metal. That is indeed a fact. How so? Just like nu-metal in its heyday, the genre is exciting music fans new and old with a meshing of two styles which on paper seems polar opposites. CSS helped breed the monster into the critically and commercially successful beast that it is, and The Klaxons debut album, Myths Of The Near Future and making sure it's being gorged.

The singles “Gravity's Rainbow”, “Magick” and “Atlantis to Interzone” frequent the album, but they almost pale in comparisons to the grandeur efforts of an upcoming single “Golden Skans”, and an outrageously impressive cover of Grace's “It's Not Over” and soon to be festival anthem “Forgotten Works”.

"Nu-Rave", "dancepunk", whatever you want to call it, The Klaxons debut album is simply a must - a definitive landscaping of the merging dance/rave/indie scene where CSS have left the door wide open for other acts to congregate.

New Pants - Dragon Tiger Panacea. Nerdcore is a phrase seldom used in the pages of the magazine; to clarify, nerdcore is pretty much a concept of dance music that's somewhat uncool and 'techno-geek" that it is by default cool. Devo would be the first of which to explore nerdcore on an electronic level, and in the spirit of the whole discopunk/nu-rave phenomena that has swept the Western world of it's feet, the Eastern world has followed suit. 

New Pants is an amalgamation of everything that is wrong with Eurodance done right with samples ranging from stereotypical martial-arts dubbing to some really infectious breakbeats. Such is the almost disco influence with the album, that at times it can be so cheesy it's good; something the likes of Shit!Disco or Datarock might be worried about, given the at times serious motives of their sound. An utterly intriguing, fun album!

Idlewild – Make A New World.

If Warning/Promises split the fanbase Idlewild once had, Make A New World will further splinter those holding out for the Scottish alt.rockers to make a return to their punkier roots of Captain or Hope Is The Same. Coming off some time apart after the controversy surrounding their previous album, the group at times have some inspirational moments (No Emotion teases a disco-punk number while album opener “In Competition For The Worst Time” harks on an Interpol sound almost), it just seems that on the whole, it's the same formulaic approach from a band that seem stubborn about the music advances around them.

You would hope for something fresh, with lead singer Roddy Woomble spending time in New York as well as a solo folk project, but it's more of the same from the band; which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it isn't an exciting prospect either, sadly

Chris Cornell - Carry On. I'll be honest - I wept. I openly wept when listening to Chris Cornell's latest solo album, Carry On, not because it's beautiful, but because of what Chris Cornell has become - amidst some very solid melodies and some staple Cornell vocals, in its rasping warmth we've all come to know and love now, this very much plays out as a vain pet project lacking the depth one gathered from Euphoria Morning. 

Perhaps Cornell was searching for atonement regarding the limp final days of Audioslave, drawing in fans of his much earlier work who have now swapped their Badmotorfinger shirts for smart-but-casual outfits; and with Cornell resorting to covering Michael Jackson's seminal "Billie Jean", a track you'd assure would be full of the vitriol we all know and love from him, and taking the middle of the road, then you'll understand why the tears were flowing. Simply heartbreaking.

Nick Oliveri and The Mondo Generator - Dead Planet:SonicSlowMotionTrails. For those somewhat disappointed with the last Queens Of The Stone Age album, the first in which cult-icon Nick Oliveri wasn't affiliated with, you can take solace now that, after the previous two, ahem, experiments, Mondo Generator's latest album does indeed live up to its promise. 

It helps that Oliveri had an army of incredibly gifted musicians behind him, the spotlight shining heavily on the talents of Ben Thomas and Ben Perrier of Winnebago Deal. Instead of a harsh album of alternative metal much like A Drug Problem That Never Existed, it's audibility falls on more punk roots than anything else - and the switching between his trademark 'howl' and a more smooth singing style adding a degree more depth to Oliveri. 

Though it'll never live up to Songs For The Deaf, it surpasses recent stoner rock albums by heads and shoulders.

[theconservativebrief]

Harlan Ellison, the legendary, legendarily irascible speculative fiction writer who died this week at age 84, wrote the greatest episode of Star Trek ever made. And he hated it.

“The City on the Edge of Forever” aired on April 6, 1967, late in the original series’ first season, and won acclaim for capturing everything Star Trek could do at its best while suggesting weighty themes and emotional depths only hinted at in previous episodes. It won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Episodic Drama on Television. Ellison accepted both. Neither salved his bitterness that the episode had been rewritten.

At the Hugos he dedicated the award to “the memory of the script they butchered, and in respect to those parts of it that had the vitality to shine through the evisceration.” “The City on the Edge of Forever” that aired may have been praised by virtually everyone who saw it, but it wasn’t his “City on the Edge of Forever,” and a compromised triumph was no triumph at all for Ellison. Ellison would spend the next several decades being publicly aggrieved by “City on the Edge of Forever.”

Was the reaction overkill? Of course. Overkill was part of Ellison’s persona. He held grudges. He deployed lawsuits liberally, sometimes successfully. (He’s now acknowledged in the credits of The Terminator thanks to one such suit.) He boasted of assaulting his publisher in the ’80s. And many never looked at him the same way after he groped author Connie Willis at the Hugos in 2006, for which he apologized ��� then grew angry when the apology wasn’t immediately accepted.

Ellison was famous for his contributions to science fiction and American literature, which extend well beyond his Star Trek script. But he was also famous for his grievances. The story of “The City on the Edge of Forever” represents that duality in miniature, and helps explain what made him both a beloved and divisive figure.

Ellison originally imagined the talking portal in “City on the Edge of Tomorrow,” seen here, as 9-foot aliens. CBS via Getty Images

Here’s the version of “The City on the Edge of Forever” that’s been seen by countless viewers since 1967: After administering a small dose of a dangerous drug to Lt. Sulu (George Takei), Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) accidentally administers a massive dose to his own abdomen after getting knocked about when the Enterprise hits some interference from a strange time distortion.

Driven temporarily mad, McCoy beams down to the nearest planet, home to the Guardian of Forever, a talking portal that allows visitors to travel through time and space. When McCoy uses it to travel back to Depression-era New York, the Enterprise’s landing party learns their ship has disappeared. Whatever McCoy has done has distorted history in such a way that the universe as they know it has ceased to exist.

Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) give chase, in time learning that McCoy has changed time by saving the life of Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), the near-saintly proprietor of a soup kitchen. If allowed to live, her idealistic message of pacifism and tolerance will delay the United States’ entry into World War II, allowing Hitler to develop the atomic bomb, win the war, and dominate the Earth — shutting the door on the hopeful future imagined throughout the series.

And so, as Spock says twice in the episode — first as a question then as a statement arrived at through cold, hard logic — Edith Keeler must die. The only problem: Kirk has fallen in love with her and isn’t sure he can bring himself to let her die. But, after reuniting with McCoy, he does just that, stopping the doctor from saving Edith from a truck that strikes her down in the street.

Many elements contribute to the episode’s greatness. The Guardian’s planet is an eerie, dreamlike place, one that inspires Kirk to comment, with understated poetic flair, “These ruins stretch to the horizon.” Journeyman director Joseph Pevney wisely lets the atmosphere, both of the alien world and 1930s New York, do a lot of the work.

Then there’s Shatner, who, often justifiably, gets a lot of flak for laying it on thick, but his performance here is measured. His love for Edith feels real, far removed from the flings seen in previous episodes. So does his heartbreak.

Yet much of the brilliance can be traced back to the script. Star Trek had raised philosophical issues before, but few as thorny as whether taking one life can be justified in the name of a greater good. And not just any life: Kirk falls for Edith because she’s virtuous and beautiful and finds him charming, sure, but also because she’s the living embodiment of the utopian principles he’s sworn to uphold as a member of Starfleet.

She believes in humanity’s potential to overcome hatred and selfishness, in the possibility of the better future in which Kirk lives. But to make that future possible, he has to let her die. She has the right message at the wrong time. It’s a Kobayashi Maru scenario in the form of a tragic romance.

It’s a near-perfect episode of television, recognized as such from the moment it aired. The credits bore only one name: Harlan Ellison.

Ellison knew it was a lie. He’d seen the script through several drafts, only to have it reworked, at Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s insistence, by D.C. Fontana, Gene Coon, Steven W. Carabatsos, and Roddenberry himself. Ellison asked his name be taken off, but backed down. It would be the last time he backed down on this matter.

Most writers would sit back, take the praise, and keep quiet about the sausage-making process. Ellison wasn’t most writers, telling anyone who’d listen what had happened to his script, all the alterations and adjustments that made it lesser than the version he’d dreamed up. In 1975, during a short-lived rapprochement with Roddenberry, Ellison published the original version in his collection Six Science Fiction Plays, allowing the curious to compare and contrast the version they knew with the version that might have been.

Ellison’s version shares much of the filmed version’s bone structure. The time travel, Edith Keeler, the central moral question are all there. But it also contains a murderous drug-dealing crew member (an element Roddenberry found out of sync with his vision of an idealized future and a squeaky clean Starfleet), alternate-universe space pirates summoned into existence by the altering of time, 9-foot aliens (who would become the much more budget-friendly talking portal), and a World War I veteran named Trooper.

Most significantly, at the climactic moment, Kirk can’t bring himself to let Edith die. It’s Spock who makes the choice. Ellison saw Kirk as a man who, at a critical juncture, couldn’t let the love of his life die to save the universe. Roddenberry thought otherwise. The question of which feels truer to Kirk, and to Trek, serves as a litmus test for fans of the show.

Without Ellison’s talent and imagination, “The City on the Edge of Forever” wouldn’t have existed. Applying the butterfly effect to its absence — appropriate, given the episode’s plot — the Star Trek we know today wouldn’t have been possible without the ripples of complexity and moral ambiguity Ellison helped introduce to the series. (Not that Ellison had anything nice to say about the later series.)

But Ellison, whose early history includes multiple stories of running away from home, could seemingly never live comfortably in any world, even a world he helped create, be it Star Trek or the larger world of speculative fiction, which he helped shape with his work and his championing of other writers. Because Ellison could always imagine a better world, one in which “The City on the Edge of Forever” aired without evisceration, one in which the same sort of piggish shortsightedness that led to that evisceration wasn’t allowed to run rampant in so many aspects of life, one in which everyone finally saw he was right.

Reflecting on “The City on the Edge of Forever” years later, Ellison wrote, “The solitary creator, dreaming his or her dream, unaided, seems to me to be the only artist we can trust.” Ellison did a lot of that sort of dreaming. Sometimes the dreams went astray.

Ellison’s adventures in the TV trade — there would be more, and more frustrations — prompted him to write about television for the Los Angeles Free Press, unsparing observations collected in the influential 1970 book The Glass Teat and its sequel, The Other Glass Teat. It also assured he’d keep prose as his primary profession, helping to shepherd and elevate the literary careers of others.

The landmark collection Dangerous Visions, a collection of stories from science fiction stars and stars-to-be, appeared the same year as “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Again, Dangerous Visions followed in 1972. (A long-promised third volume never arrived.) He mentored Octavia Butler and others. He wrote. And wrote. And wrote. In a 2013 interview with the Guardian, Ellison put his tally at around 1,800 short stories, novellas, essays, and scripts. Today, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” both the filmed teleplay and Ellison’s original drafts, represent only a tiny fraction of his output and influence.

Ellison (right) eventually came to terms with his role in Star Trek’s history, speaking alongside Walter Koenig at the 13th annual Star Trek convention. FilmMagic

But even with his version of “The City on the Edge of Forever” available for the world to read, the matter felt unsettled for Ellison. It didn’t help that Roddenberry was out there telling his version of the story, claiming that Ellison’s script was filled with budget-breaking elements and that he had Commander Scotty dealing drugs.

Ellison knew better. The pirates were added at Roddenberry’s insistence and Scotty never dealt drugs in any drafts. He didn’t even appear in any drafts. Then there was all that money others were making from the episode, money that seemed never to find its way to Ellison.

This would not stand. So in 1995, four years after Roddenberry’s death, Ellison published “The City on the Edge of Forever” again, this time as a standalone book titled The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay. The book includes two treatments for the episode; Ellison’s final draft of the screenplay; testimonials from Fontana, Kelley, Nimoy, and others; and a new introduction from Ellison designed to set the record straight.

The opening sets the tone:

“Speak no ill of the dead?

Oh, really? Then let’s forget about a true introductory essay to this book. Let’s give a pass to setting the record straight. Let’s just shrug and say, ah, what the hell, it’s been more than thirty years and the bullshit has been slathered on with a trowel for so damned long, and so many greedy little pig-snouts have made so much money off those lies, and so many inimical forces continue to dip their pig-snouts in that Star Trek trough of bullshit that no one wants to hear your miserable bleats of “unfair! unfair” … that it ain’t worth the price of admission, Ellison.”

And so it goes for 90 profane, repetitive, discursive, hilarious, pitiless, insightful pages. It’s, in its own way, classic Ellison, who turned interviews into monologues. Smart interviewers generally knew to get out of his way and just let him talk. In the end, Ellison always had the last word. And then he just kept talking.

Ellison was sometimes too much, and too much in ways that are hard to excuse; offenses committed out of an excess of passion are still offenses. But, oh, that passion. Ellison simply had to fight back against every perceived slight and loss. He even had to fight back against any wins that weren’t on his own terms. He left behind miles of scorched earth and a towering body of work. He reshaped science fiction and changed the way his readers looked at the world. It wasn’t enough. Nothing ever was.

Original Source -> Harlan Ellison wrote Star Trek’s greatest episode. He hated it.

via The Conservative Brief

[ricardosousalemos]

The Notorious B.I.G.: Born Again

Born Again commences Biggie’s posthumous disemboweling. It’s the first project bearing his name that was conceived, produced, and completed after the Brooklyn icon had gasped his last breaths. By now, rap fans are deeply familiar with this baleful, unlovely creature—the posthumous collection of reworked demos, outtakes, and leftovers cobbled together by executives and hired guns, paired with a list of guest artists and of-the-moment producers. They reek of boardroom meetings. They usually fill you with a hollow, complicit feeling for even hitting “play.” It is hard to think of five such records in pop-music history that justify their existence after their first-week sales figures have posted.

In the two years since Biggie’s death, his mentor and corporate svengali Puff Daddy had already found several ingenious ways to siphon cash and attention from his dead protégé. Puffy's solo album, long in the works, was retitled No Way Out from working title Hell Up In Harlem and overhauled after Biggie’s death, emerging full of gothic dread and intimations of ready-to-die-ness. Its biggest single was his Police-sampling, “I’ll Fly Away”-interpolating “I’ll Be Missing You,” a maudlin tribute to The Notorious B.I.G. that spent 11 weeks at No. 1.

The following year, he released the debut album from The Lox, a hardheaded trio of Yonkers rappers with a deafening street buzz. Puff decked them in shiny suits and dropped them in front of Hype Williams’ fish-eye lens, where they looked about as comfortable as middle schoolers stranded at prom. The album included the less-heralded, equally maudlin tribute, “We’ll Always Love Big Poppa.” In the video, baby-faced Jadakiss, Sheek Louch, and Styles P poured their hearts out to their dead friend, while Puff Daddy stood behind them, pointing meaningfully at the camera. It was clear that whatever Puff thought of the grief process, he didn’t see much need to keep it behind closed doors.

Somewhere in there came the announcement for Born Again. Initial reports promised a sort of Biggie bildungsroman, pairing narration from Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace with unheard demos and unreleased material. Rap listeners had been busily copping and sharing Biggie exclusives from a steady stream of mixtapes, freestyles and unfinished cuts dating back to 1993, but those traveled in rarefied circles, and the idea of a studio album bringing this stuff to the masses was enticing. But the story changed quickly, and often; a full-page ad in the September ‘99 issue of The Source promised some intrigue, including a track that would posthumously reunite Biggie and 2Pac and a new remix of “Party & Bullshit” that foretold an appearance from Will Smith. For better or for worse, this never came to pass, and what ended up being released was a jumble of some older, less well-known verses and some recycled material from already-available releases.

Born Again wasn’t Biggie’s story. Sure, it spawned one or two lasting cuts: the flashy, Duran Duran-sampling “Notorious B.I.G.” and the vicious early pre-Ready To Die demo “Dead Wrong.” But the real story it tells is about Puff Daddy—how he flailed into the spotlight after Big’s death, how he treated his protégé’s legacy. He immediately sought to cast himself as Biggie’s equal: You can see the video for “Victory” as a sort of prelude. Biggie’s verse play is just background music for shots of Puff Daddy running slow motion in front of explosions in the rain.

This is the kind of Biggie album Puff made without the stubborn, strong-willed Wallace present in the room to dig in his heels and say “no.” The production for the album makes no sense—it made no sense for a Biggie album in 1999, and it makes even less sense in 2017. The dank, chaotic original “Niggas” from 1993, produced by Mister Cee and gloriously scarred up with frenetic scratching, gets cleaned up and “updated” all the way to 1999, sounding tame and inert. The Timb-boot funk of that basement session evaporates completely, and the song loses all of its meaning transferred into major-label sunlight.  

Similarly, it’s nice to think about Mannie Fresh and Biggie in the same room with Biggie alive—they were both inventive, antic minds that loved surprising word choices and unpredictable flows. But hearing Biggie’s second ferocious verse stripped from the original version of “Dead Wrong”—a song, remember, that appears elsewhere on this album—laid over Fresh’s bouncy instrumental “Hope You Niggas Sleep,” and followed by verses from all the members of Hot Boys and Big Tymers, only underscores how dead Wallace was.

His verse from “Dangerous MCs,” meanwhile, was meant to appear on a song from Busta Rhymes’ The Coming, produced by J Dilla. It was scrapped purportedly because of some veiled threats at 2Pac lurking in it and the album’s makers were leery of tossing any more powder into the keg. With them both dead, Big’s incendiary lines detonate harmlessly over an airless, functional beat from Nottz: “Catch my drift/Or catch my four-fifth lift/At least six inches above project fences/Turn meat to minces/Jumps turn to flinches/When I rain I drenches/Cleared your park benches.” Hearing one dead man launch subliminals at another dead one is perverse, particularly since the producers arranged some East Coast/West Coast unity kabuki elsewhere on the project, bringing Ice Cube to rap a verse on “If I Should Die Before I Wake” saluting Biggie as the “King of New York.”

Is any of it worth it? Tough to say. Without this album, you might have never heard “Relax and take notes while I take tokes of the marijuana smoke.” That’s a canonical line, and it introduces “Dead Wrong,” the only near-classic here. The original, produced by Easy Moe Bee, is a giggly and profane game of Dozens, Biggie indulging his filthy imagination for all its worth: broomsticks get used for unspeakable purposes and Lucifer is laughed out of the room. On the new version, the stakes are higher, and the music sharper, a sideways-jerking, always-falling-off-the-beat thing that samples the Rev. Al Green, of all people. He didn’t even fuck it up by including a new verse from a pissy white kid named Eminem on it, a rapper Big had never heard of who had mostly become famous at that point for making fun of his mom and boy bands. It all sounds a little tired in retrospect—“cannibals and exorcisms, animals havin' sex with 'em”—but at the time, it was a revelation.

The decision to bring Eminem in said a lot about Puffy’s shifting priorities. Mark Pitts, an executive producer on Born Again, likened the project to “building Frankenstein.” Even shortly after working on the project, he sounded queasy about it: “The only thing that bothered me was the [guests artists] on the album. He would’ve respected them all, but he wouldn’t have worked with them all. Just because they’re hot doesn’t mean they mesh.”

Soon, he would accompany artists he wouldn’t have even respected: Korn comes to mind. The trail of artists who can technically claim to have appeared alongside the Notorious B.I.G. has only grown more disheartening with time. “I did real songs with Big, no made-up shits,” Jadakiss sneered at 50 Cent in their 2006 battle. By then, having recorded a song next to Biggie Smalls was no longer rarefied air, and these were the first unreal songs with Big. In that sense, they inaugurated a long and sad tradition.

From Hendrix to Elvis to Nirvana, none of this death-industry stuff is new. But in hip-hop, a music tied so closely to the inhuman ravages of the drug war and the carceral state, the charge pulsed a little hotter. Nineties gangsta rap always smelled of sulfur, of various deals cut with sundry devils, and its most potent tracks gave those who confronted them a mortal thrill. Alive, Big could inhabit this archetype and artfully squirm out of it in the same line, and it only took his presence—no more, no less—to set this animation in motion. “Excuse me, flows just grow through me/Like trees to branches, cliffs to avalanches,” he deadpanned on a throwaway line from Ready To Die’s “The What.” You could lose an hour, or a year, thinking about the imagery there, plumbing the mind that casually bundled those two thoughts together. “We dress up like ladies and burn ‘em with dirty .380s,” he proposed on the Life After Death cut “Niggas Bleed.” These lines are well-worn by repetition that they should, by all rights, have lost their strangeness. And yet they have not: Imagine Big, all 300 pounds of him, packing heat, dressed in woman’s clothes; once your mind’s eye has seen that, you won’t ever lose it. It’s indelible.

On Born Again, he is immobilized, and can thus perform none of these tricks. You can feel the absence of his animating touch—his hot breath, his shrewd eye, his capacious ear. This is when the mortification of his body was complete, and he was rendered as just a voice that others could manipulate without his consent. He has nothing to do with the music and no way of playing against his environment. As a result, there’s no inner music at work, nothing much to listen harder for. A good artist leads you into their genre from some other, outside place, showing you the familiar shapes through the warping lens of their mind. Their individual predilections and quirks become elemental laws of physics, rules. Biggie’s voice is all over Born Again, but you feel the absence of his mind. Here, he is just a gangsta rapper, the nimblest one that ever lived.